Project: The ProteOMZ Expedition: Investigating Life Without Oxygen in the Pacific Ocean

From Schmidt Ocean Institute's ProteOMZ Project page:

Rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and overfishing have now gained widespread notoriety as human-caused phenomena that are changing our seas. In recent years, scientists have increasingly recognized that there is yet another ingredient in that deleterious mix: a process called deoxygenation that results in less oxygen available in our seas.

Large-scale ocean circulation naturally results in low-oxygen areas of the ocean called oxygen deficient zones (ODZs). The cycling of carbon and nutrients – the foundation of marine life, called biogeochemistry – is fundamentally different in ODZs than in oxygen-rich areas. Because researchers think deoxygenation will greatly expand the total area of ODZs over the next 100 years, studying how these areas function now is important in predicting and understanding the oceans of the future. This first expedition of 2016 led by Dr. Mak Saito from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) along with scientists from University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, University of California Santa Cruz, and University of Washington aimed to do just that, investigate ODZs.

During the 28 day voyage named “ProteOMZ,” researchers aboard R/V Falkor traveled from Honolulu, Hawaii to Tahiti to describe the biogeochemical processes that occur within this particular swath of the ocean’s ODZs. By doing so, they contributed to our greater understanding of ODZs, gathered a database of baseline measurements to which future measurements can be compared, and established a new methodology that could be used in future research on these expanding ODZs.